Budget Resolutions

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow a north-west colleague, the hon. Member for Leigh (James Grundy), who has given an excellent maiden speech; I hope his constituents enjoyed it as much as I did. I am also very pleased that we heard from another north-west colleague, the hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter). It is always a pleasure to hear from more women in the House, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) on her speech.

Yesterday’s borrow-and-spend Budget represents, as others have noticed, a major change in direction for this Conservative Government, but an understandable one against a worrying backdrop of the Brexit impact highlighted in the OBR’s “Economic and fiscal outlook”, which acknowledges the reduction in business investment since 2016, the reduction in output of 2%, and trade barriers that will continue to have an adverse effect throughout the forecast period and beyond. Of course, as the Chancellor himself noted yesterday, there is also the impact of coronavirus, for which he has rightly allocated an initial £5 billion emergency pot. That additional funding is absolutely vital for the NHS and social care services to cope with the pandemic, but funding will not, of course, mean that we can recruit the additional staff we need overnight.

I query, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), the sense of the immigration health surcharge, which will affect workers in the NHS and social care sectors, including those who have been here for many years with leave to remain. I am surprised and concerned, too, that we still have no detail on public health budgets, which will be vital for local authorities to carry out their role in protecting the public.

I do of course welcome the hardship fund of £500 million for local authorities, which I note is intended largely for council tax relief, but local authorities will also need to fund support for the voluntary and community sector organisations in their communities, as they will be charged with meeting more need through the crisis. They will need to support local welfare schemes, as other colleagues have noted. That will also include, I suspect, a much greater drain on food banks.

I want to say something about the announcements in the Budget in relation to skills. The capital budget announcement is welcome, but it is still set at less than half the level in the Budget of 2010. We need much more information on the national skills fund, because there are still significant problems and gaps in reaching those who should benefit most from adult skills funding. The number of intermediate-level apprenticeships in Greater Manchester has more than halved since 2015-16, and that clearly has the biggest impact on those residents who are furthest from the labour market. We need to ensure that this new funding pot secures access to level 2 apprenticeships and to other routes. I suggest that the way in which the unused apprenticeship levy disappears back into the Treasury pot needs to be addressed. It would be extremely helpful to us in Greater Manchester if those levy moneys could be returned to the city region for us to make further investment in adult skills.

There is still no information about the national retraining scheme for adults looking to retrain. We have had two years of consultation on this already, and it is disappointing that, while the Red Book acknowledges the importance of a cultural change in relation to adult retraining, there are still no specifics before the House.

As others have noted, we are also still waiting for detail on the replacement for the shared prosperity fund, which is worth £59 million per annum to Greater Manchester, is of vital importance in supporting deprived communities and individuals and supports some excellent work, including in the not-for-profit sector through organisations such as the St Antony’s Centre in my community.

While the funding announcements in relation to skills are welcome, I would like to urge greater devolution overall of adult skills funding to Greater Manchester, building on the £92 million adult education budget that has already been devolved to us.

I share with other colleagues disappointment in relation to the announcements that affect family budgets—or the lack of announcements, particularly following a long legacy of social security freezes and cuts. As we heard, the Treasury’s own distributional analysis shows that those in the eighth and ninth income deciles are gaining most from tax and benefits changes, while the lowest income decile loses in cash terms.

I am really disappointed to see no action on the two-child policy, the five-week wait, aligning local housing allowance with market rents, lifting the benefit cap and increasing payments for children through child benefit. For all the fanfare around universal credit over the last 10 years, our social security system remains punitive, complex and as mean as it has ever been. As our economy faces particularly choppy times, investment in family incomes should be a priority.

I also want to press the Government on the need for much greater ambition on climate change. There was very little that was new or radical in the announcements yesterday, and I hope we will see much greater ambition when the comprehensive spending review is presented later this year.

I conclude by repeating a plea that I have made again and again in recent months for details on when the funding for the clean bus and clean freight funds for Greater Manchester will be provided. We desperately need that funding to bring in measures that will enable us to replace our dirty buses and support small businesses to replace the freight fleet that will otherwise damage our climate plans. I hope the Economic Secretary to the Treasury will pursue that with his colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Transport. We desperately need that funding. It is holding us back in Greater Manchester, and I hope that this is the last time I have to ask.